


Playing for Keeps

by thermodynamic (euphoriaspill)



Series: Chaos Theory [7]
Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Babies, Brother-Sister Relationships, Drug Addiction, Eating Disorders, F/M, Gangs, Getting Back Together, Grooming, Heroin, Hippies, LSD, M/M, Marijuana, Mental Health Issues, Miscarriage, Musicians, Native American Character(s), POV Character of Color, POV First Person, Past Rape/Non-con, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Sharing a Bed, Teen Pregnancy, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24613363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/euphoriaspill/pseuds/thermodynamic
Summary: 1967, the Summer of Love; adrift with Soda in Vietnam, Jasmine Curtis finds herself ensnared by a mysterious anti-war group.
Relationships: Bryon Douglas/Other(s), Cathy Carlson/Ponyboy Curtis, Curly Shepard/Original Female Character(s), Darrel Curtis/Original Female Character(s), Randy Adderson/Ponyboy Curtis, Tim Shepard/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Chaos Theory [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/890436
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30





	1. Deadbeat Summer

_Good sense, innocence, crippling mankind_

_Dead kings, many things I can't define_

_Occasions, persuasions clutter your mind_

_Incense and peppermints, the color of time_

— Incense and Peppermints, Strawberry Alarm Clock

* * *

_May 25th, 1967_

School had just let out a week ago, the summer stretching out hot in front of me like the Mojave Desert, and I was rereading a crumpled letter for what must've been the millionth time. Soda wasn't especially verbose, so it never took me too long to get to the end and start from the top again, like I'd discover something I'd missed before.

_Hey Jas,_

_Boy am I glad Dad took us hunting 'cause some of the motherfuckers in this platoon couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if there lives depended on it. Should of gotten Steve to enlist with me with that buddy deal so we could be here together. It's not all that bad though even if the food is shit (worse than your pot pie). Theres all sorts of crazy animals here like elefants_

(The letter cut off to some very bad doodles of elephants, but I knew they'd come from the heart.)

 _I LOVE YOU ALL_ — this took up about half the page— _and I can't wait until I'm out of this shithole and home with y'all. Make sure Darry and Pony ain't fighting okay. And tell Curly if he breaks your heart I'll break his neck. They taught me a lot of ways to do it in boot camp._

_Love (again),_

_Sodapop Curtis_

His information was out of date, as was the letter— it was dated February, about a month after he'd shipped out from boot camp to Quảng Ngãi province, and we hadn't heard a word from him since. I tried to tell myself to stop worrying over nothing, that if he'd been injured— or God forbid killed— we would've received word by now. That Soda was notoriously flighty and forgetful, and that military correspondence from Southeast Asia wasn't the fastest delivery the postal service had to offer. I kept telling myself over and over again, like repeating the Lord's Prayer, until I'd halfway convinced myself it was true.

"Jasmine, can you do me a favor?" Judy's shrill voice carried all the way out to the porch, and I groaned. Leave it to her to interrupt my brooding— in fact, I wasn't sure I'd had a single uninterrupted thought since she moved in.

Darry and Judy's marriage was about the most mercenary thing I'd ever seen, and I used to sell drugs; in the pictures of me at the wedding, I was wearing some lilac mess that washed me out bad, trying not to look too hungover on camera. It was three weeks after Soda's deployment. Pony got best man by default. Before I could so much as blink, they'd cleared out Mom and Dad's old room and sent their stuff to Uncle Gene for storage, and Judy's makeup was on the bathroom counter, her dresses— excuse me, _frocks_ — slung over everywhere, and her attitude all up in what used to be my turf.

Darry's motivations were pretty obvious— not only did he figure out that once Ponyboy turned eighteen, it'd be open season on him from the draft board, but Miz Edwards was still making not-so-subtle comments about how him getting married would finally get the state off his back re: my urgent need for a female role model (apart from my Aunt Rose, who, last I'd heard, was responding pretty well to electroshock therapy). As for Judy, she was harder to read, but she was one of those spoiled rich girls who'd always had a taste for danger— as long as she could come back to her safe West side house at night— which had made high school Darry her perfect match. Now that she'd actually run off for good and was stuck living in our neighborhood, with its rundown furniture, refrigerators and couches on the lawns, and odd shootout, we'd long since lost most of our charm.

" _Jasmine_?"

If I waited any longer, she'd come outside, and I definitely didn't want that; I heaved myself up with a sigh, brushed the dust off my ass, and pushed the screen door open. Judy was lying on the couch, her eyes shut though she'd closed the blinds in the living room, a damp towel pressed over her forehead. "Yeah?" I replied, in a way Mom would've scolded me for— she liked hearing 'yes, ma'am', didn't want strangers to think she raised her kids in a barn— but Judy sure as hell wasn't my mama.

"Can you go to the corner store and pick me up some ginger ale and saltines?" she said, her voice breathy and weak— I could hear the million men she'd used it on in that voice, to do her a million little favors. "You're not doin' anything, are you?"

I fished around for an excuse, couldn't come up with one in time, and settled for sheer intransigence. "The store ain't far from here, you don't even have to drive, don't you remember where it is?" I'd been worried she might mess up the little domestic routine I had going, but my fears turned out to be unfounded, because Judy was the laziest person I'd ever met— and I'd met Two-Bit. Having grown up with two rotating housekeepers, just the task of pushing her own dirt from one end of the place to another seemed to tax her reserves of energy.

"I told you, I'm not feelin' good—" her voice had now slid into a decided whine— "I'm real nauseous. Can't you just do this one thing for me?"

She was usually more subtle than that, which made me think that she was actually sick, not just putting on a display of learned helplessness. As much as I didn't want her around, I doubted she was more thrilled about having to share her husband and marital home with two teenagers, who came with the package. She wasn't quite malicious in the way Rose could be with me, her mind a collection of schemes like a Rube Goldberg machine— she didn't have near enough going on upstairs for more than petty sniping. That was why I reluctantly said "all right" and grabbed my silver purse from the arm of the couch.

"Thanks, Jasmine, you can be real sweet when you want to be," she said, and I accepted the backhanded compliment in the spirit it was intended— Judy was the kind of southern girl who never insulted anyone without prefacing it with 'bless her heart'. Still, I hauled ass. At least this gave me an excuse to get out of the house, out of my head.

* * *

I had good intentions, really, of coming right back with Judy's ginger ale. But you know what they say about those... I ran into Bryon at the store, he was working the register that day, and in the time it took him to ring me up, he'd convinced me to wait around long enough for him to clock out and drive me home.

I didn't love Bryon and I was reasonably certain he didn't love me, either— he'd had a reputation around school as a ladykiller, a real hustler, which was fine by me, because I had a reputation for being fast myself, despite only having slept with two guys of my own volition. I knew once we finished school, or he got drafted, or he met someone more his type, another 'classy' Cathy Carlson, he would move on from me and whatever we had would be over; I'd just been trying to piss Curly off in the beginning, if I was really being honest with myself. But he had a certain sweetness and vulnerability that endeared him to me, the air of an overgrown Saint Bernard puppy with his dark eyes and hair, especially with Mark gone. Things seemed so solid in Bryon's world, black and white, right and wrong; I'd found it refreshing, back then, when I'd spent so much time wrestling with questions he found had self-evident answers.

What could I say. Getting fucked over by the Shepards really had a way of bringing two people together.

He pressed me up against the side of his car once we were in the parking lot, one hand cupping my ass, the other twisted up in my hair; I'd started flat-ironing it now, letting it hang down to my mid-back, a fashion I swore started overnight. "I missed you," he said, and the less cynical part of me wanted to believe he meant it. "Been workin' so much I can't remember which way is up."

"How's your mama doin', then?" I asked as I slid into the passenger seat— the car was a junker, a pale blue '54 Skylark that was barely street legal, but he was proud as hell of it all the same. She had a pretty bad case of Crohn's disease; she'd been back in the hospital for yet another surgery, getting half of her large intestine removed. I'd come to like her well enough, though she happened to be easily one of the least engaged mothers I'd ever met.

"She's better, she came home a couple days ago— they decided against givin' her an ostomy bag this time, which is good," he said. "Already wonderin' when you're comin' around again, you know she's been real lonely without—"

Without Mark around— it always seemed to come back to Mark, in the end, and Bryon's voice trailed off into ribbons of smoke. I wanted to broach the silence somehow, but nothing seemed right, until he opened up the console and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. It was half-empty, which surprised me, Bryon didn't have much of a taste for boozing; he unscrewed the cap, and the scent, sharp in its sweetness, filled the hot interior. "Want some?" he asked as he tipped it towards me, having taken a solid gulp himself. I did, and I almost spilled some down my front as he hit the gas.

"Guess who came by the other day," he said once we were circling Hunter Park.

"Who?"

"No, guess."

I rolled my eyes. "John Wayne. Natalie Wood. Sean Connery. I'm on the edge of my seat here."

He let out a low whistle. "Miss Angela Shepard herself. Or, excuse me, _Mrs. Hernandez._ "

A violent nausea rose through me at her name, like I just drank a bottle of drain cleaner, and fought the temptation to crack open Judy's ginger ale. "Huh," I said, thankful that my heart-shaped sunglasses shielded my face from view. "What'd she want, then?"

"She gave me the usual, started goin' off about how I could snitch on my own brother—"

"Bet you just loved that."

"Told her she looked _real_ good with short hair. If that didn't shut her right up..."

I stifled a laugh behind my fist, and he gave me a scolding look as he shifted into second gear, or, well, tried to shift into second gear and scraped the side of a mailbox. Like he was counting on me to fill the role of his malfunctioning conscience. "Figured you'd have called me an asshole for that by now, I thought you two were real good friends."

"Me too," I said shortly, "until she decided to break a bottle over my brother's head. Things change." I pushed my hair back with my sunglasses, in a neat wave, and examined the result in his rearview mirror. "I'm sure Princess Shepard considers herself _en vogue_ with the Twiggy look, anyway, I ain't worried about her vanity."

The vitriol coming from my mouth surprised even me, and I was the one saying it, towards a fifteen— no, she must've just turned sixteen— year-old girl who was married off right after her quinceañera. But I'd told her to get an abortion back when she got knocked up in the fall, like both her grandmother Niamh and Tim had wanted— she'd insisted on going through with it, hitching her star to Rafa's wagon. At this point, I really didn't consider her marital happiness or lack thereof my concern, I'd tried to do more than enough for her.

A mean sort of smirk formed around the side of his mouth. "You tore out half her scalp in the parking lot last fall, guess I shouldn't have expected you to be too fussed."

I remembered that with some grim satisfaction, even all these months later, even considering all of the trouble it had brought me. "She should've been rolling around on the floor with her brothers growin' up, the way I was. At least then she'd be able to throw her own right hooks."

Bryon took another sip from the bottle, like he was trying to work up enough courage to say what he thought. "Someone messed with my locker, last day of school." His voice was as flat as soda left out for a week. "Carved 'snitch' onto the front. Guess it was one of Mark's old friends."

"Yeah?" I didn't like what he'd done, it didn't sit any better with me a couple of months after the fact. But I didn't quite have the strength to condemn him, either, not when the rest of the world and his own mind were already working overtime on that.

"People expect me to be happy about it, like I put some kingpin in the slammer," he said. "Or be flagellating myself from guilt. But I'm just... runnin' on empty, I guess."

I reached out to touch his forearm; when he looked at me, his eyes were a brown so dark I found it difficult to distinguish between the iris and the pupil. I had never liked Mark much, though he and Ponyboy were good friends before he got arrested— there was something about him I found deeply unsettling, a kind of careless criminality that reminded me of Luis, the certainty that his actions would never have consequences that didn't glance off him. I liked him even less for the hold he still seemed to have on everyone, a way of monopolizing the room even from hundreds of miles away.

"Seems like the only time I feel anything at all is when we're riding around together," he added, and then I cranked the window down, lit a cigarette to avoid saying anything in response. I should've been pleased that Bryon Douglas, heartbreaker of heartbreakers, was falling for me, but instead a vague sense of unease coated me like the first snow falling in winter. I wasn't so good at being any man's better half.

* * *

"Jasmine," came Darry's drawl as I walked through the front door, "you really do give 'fashionably late' a whole new meaning."

I was surprised to see him seated at the dinner table, with the amount of extra shifts he'd been picking up lately— dressed not in his usual dusty work clothes, but in a starched button-down and... chinos? Seeing Ponyboy was another shock, he was never even home anymore, and weirdly enough, I had no idea where he went all day. Probably his girlfriend Cathy's place, if I had to guess— no, I couldn't believe I'd seen the day he got one either— or at track practice or debate practice or something, but the months I'd spent pushing had taught me how to sniff out when someone was up to no good, though you didn't need the nose of a bloodhound to get on this case. He'd had a taste for pot since our parents were still alive, you could smell it on his shirts as he came home red-eyed and with his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth. How _Darry_ hadn't noticed yet was beyond me.

(The gang was more accurately described as 'Soda's friends', and though Dally and Johnny's deaths hadn't quite managed to splinter them, Soda's deployment was the final nail in the coffin; Steve and Two-Bit had split off into a tight private twosome, carrying on drag-racing and rumbling and drinking hard in his absence, but while Darry might've still been half a kid when he first took our guardianship, he was a full-grown man now, and was starting to look ridiculous street fighting or hollering at broads with them like some disaffected teenager. As for Ponyboy, without Johnny or Soda around to tether him to the others, he'd spun out of their orbit entirely.)

"Sorry," I said half-heartedly as I slapped the grocery bag down on the kitchen counter; I'd had to stay out later than I planned, in part because Bryon had pulled over for a pretty heated makeout session, in part because I needed to sober up before I came home. In my defense, Judy seemed more awake and with-it now, sitting beside Darry with a gleaming smile on her face, clutching his arm. "What are you all doin' home, huh? I forget about some national holiday?"

Darry ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck, looking sheepish. "Okay, we found out a month ago, technically," he said, and I already had the sneaking suspicion I knew what he was going to come out with next. "We were waitin' to tell everybody, but—"

"We're havin' a baby," Judy burst out before he could finish the sentence. She was already the kind of girl Steve or Two-Bit would refer to as a _real doll_ — a natural blonde, pale green eyes like flower stems, lips pink without lipstick and teeth straight without braces. What I'd attributed to the new shimmer blush they'd started putting out at the drugstore, might've just been pregnancy glow after all. She cupped her stomach like there was anything to cup yet.

"Wait, seriously?" Ponyboy slapped a hand over his mouth, but that wasn't enough to cover up his grin, which was threatening to reach both of his ears. He loved Judy, had embraced her from the start— the mama's boy of our family, I'd always suspected he felt snubbed by how Rose considered him and Soda as interesting as the upholstery. Considered her _sophisticated_ , even, because she knew the difference between types of forks and could play piano like Mom used to. "That's amazing— what do y'all hope it'll be?"

"Boy," Darry said immediately. "Jasmine's more trouble than you an' Soda put together."

"Girl," Judy gushed, "oh Lord, I just can't _wait_ to dress a little girl up, there's so many cute bows I've got to buy for her—"

Ponyboy got up from the table, and then the three of them were huddled in an awkward, sprawled-limbed hug, one that I should've joined. Something hot and heavy had settled in the pit of my stomach, though, like the first time I'd gotten my period, and it lurched into my stomach as I spoke up. "Speakin' of Soda—" Ponyboy and Judy were still oblivious, but Darry caught the edge in my voice, and judging by the slight arch of his eyebrow, he wasn't a fan. "Exactly where's this baby gonna sleep?"

"It's a four bedroom house," Darry said, "in my old room, I guess. We ain't that lackin' for space."

"And where's Soda supposed to go? When he comes home?"

The arch was rapidly getting higher; now Judy registered my hostility too, was watching me with a wary expression. "Well, he can share with Ponyboy again—"

"He ain't some kid no more, what are they gonna do, share a bed too like they did when Pony was fourteen?" I was being unreasonable and childish and unfair; I recognized it even at the time, that I should've kept my mouth shut on what was supposed to be a happy occasion, but panic was rising inside of me like a wave from the Gulf of Mexico, swallowing up all my good sense. "What are you tryna do, replace him or somethin'?"

(He'd been gone for six months, and I still felt his lack like a phantom limb. Half the time I woke up and expected him to still be there, hear him clattering around in the bathroom, singing something off-key, mediating yet another fight between Darry and Ponyboy.)

"I wasn't exactly expectin' you to throw a baby shower," Darry said, his tone now threatening dire punishment if I didn't shape up, "but last I checked, I didn't need your permission to reproduce, lil' lady."

"Yeah, I guess you don't need to ask us nothin' at all," I said, and stalked down the hall to my room. If I stuck around, I was going to either get grounded into '68 or start crying, and I didn't know which one I preferred.

* * *

I'd only managed to lie facedown on my bed for about two minutes before Darry burst into my room. He didn't bother to knock, but I begrudgingly had to admit I hadn't earned much consideration from him, either.

"Jasmine, I don't have time for this," he said, tapping his foot against the floor like a particularly nervous metronome. "Are you fucking serious right now? You're seventeen years old, throwin' a tantrum like some little kid."

" _You_ don't have time for this?" I demanded as I sat upright, hugged my knees to my chest. "Who do you think's gonna be raisin' this rugrat, huh?"

"Excuse me?" He knelt down and rested his palms on his thighs, which, as condescending as it was, still worked to intimidate me a little. "You know what, I've tried to be patient, but you just keep pushin' me every time you open that mouth—"

"She can't even boil a pot of water, Darry, I had to teach her how to use an oven." Of course he didn't see the problem here, as the father, it wasn't like he was going to be dealing with the baby once it came out. "You think she can look after a whole kid by herself? Unless you plan on hiring a nanny, that's gonna be my job, same as when Mom brought home all them kids for her daycare—"

"Don't exaggerate," Darry said. "She can make pot pie okay." Then he ran his hand through his hair, hard enough that his cowlick stuck up like he'd jammed his finger into an electric socket. "It ain't your decision, this ain't up for debate, Jesus. I'm the adult here. What do you think you are, the lady of the house or somethin'?" That one stung a little more than I wanted to admit. "We're havin' a baby and you're just gonna have to deal with it."

"You don't even _love_ her."

I expected him to put up a token objection, but Darry had never been much good at peddling bullshit to anyone. "I really, really don't want to go to Nam, and I'm perfectly draft-eligible after Ponyboy " he said from between gritted teeth. "It's this, committing a felony, or putting on a pair of lace panties before my medical examination. I picked my least painful option here."

Some of my indignation vanished at that, and I felt selfish and immature; the last thing I wanted was two brothers in Nam. "You could've at least waited to knock her up until Pony and I moved out," I offered as my final protest.

He rolled his eyes. "I hope you wait a little longer than Mom to get hitched, it's 1967 and all." A year ago, he would've stormed out of the room, and I would've gone back to screaming into the bedspread, and we both would've stayed pissed for a good long while— but we'd come to a better understanding of each other lately. He sat down beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulled me into his side. "Soda's gonna be so excited to be an uncle, trust me, he loves babies. I don't even know where you got all that junk from."

If I confided in Darry, about how I swore I could sense something wrong with Soda even from thousands of miles away, he would've just told me to quit talking nonsense— we had enough real worries without fussing over a premonition. But I still couldn't shake the terrible, haunting feeling that this baby was meant to be a replacement for him, a sick sort of deal made with God.

"I'm real nervous about this too, okay?" The way his teeth dug into his lower lip belabored the point. "I don't know how to be a dad—"

"You sort of raised us," I said, trying to be halfway helpful.

He snorted. "That's what's got me all worried."

* * *

As much as that was to process, my real troubles didn't begin until I showed up at Jay's the next day— I'd started working there last summer, though whether to prove to Darry or to myself that I could get into legitimate employment, I wasn't sure. I hadn't expected to last longer than my first week, when some greasy little creep reached for my ass and I poured hot coffee all over his hand, but as I was untying my apron and preparing my resignation speech, my boss Margaret just cackled, slapped me on the back, and poured me some of the Jack she kept in her office— she was a feminist before _Ms._ magazine ever put out its first issue, and had gone through three husbands to boot, so we got along just fine. Despite the monotony, I liked the job all right; what it lacked in excitement or decent pay, it made up in not having death threats as an occupational hazard, either.

That is, until I spotted Luis sitting in a corner booth, his face obscured by an old newspaper but still unmistakeably his— unlike the other rough characters that came through Jay's, of which there were a fair few, the black teardrop under his eye would set him apart in any crowd. I froze, couldn't move or speak for a moment, like I was having an episode of sleep paralysis; he looked up from an article about Elvis and Priscilla's wedding, gave me a smirk. "Fancy seein' you at a joint like this," he said. "You mind gettin' me some scrambled eggs, _nenita_?"


	2. Staring at the Sun

I refused to walk away from him, try to reassign the table— I strode right up, loudly clicked the button on my pen as I approached. "Guess they'll let anyone into this establishment, huh?"

His smile was quick to unfurl as he dropped the newspaper and stared up at me. "That how you talk to all your customers? I don't imagine you get a lot of tips, you don't have nearly enough southern charm."

"Cut the shit, this place is as far from your territory as it is from China." I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward. "You come here to see me?"

"You're a sharp one," he said. "It's cute seein' you all domesticated. You on the prom committee now, too?"

A lightbulb slowly went off over my head— his presence was so strong I'd forgotten he shouldn't be here at all. "Ain't you supposed to be in _la patria_? What happened to that little field trip?"

"Ain't back for good, I don't know what Timmy'll do there without me to keep an eye on him." He swept some of his hair out of his face; he'd let it grow out in Juárez, his skin glowed with a bright, coppery tan, too. He could've been taking a beach vacation for the past couple months. "Wanted to see how Curly's been holdin' down the fort."

Maybe it was the reference to Curly that made me mean. "They weren't waiting for you down there, were they?"

Twin red splotches emerged along the tops of his cheekbones, and he looked flustered for about the first time since I'd met him. "You got your mama's mouth," he said tightly. "Guess your daddy never managed to smack it out of either one of you."

There were two other customers hanging around at this hour, and yet both were staring at me expectantly. "You are fixin' to get my ass fired," I hissed at him, which was an exaggeration. Margaret was very fond of me, in part because the kind of waitresses Jay's attracted weren't the cream of the crop, mostly because I was as tuff as her and could wrangle this place. "What do you want? What are you doin' here?"

"I wanted some scrambled eggs." He fixed his face into his best approximation of innocence. "Is that too much to ask for now?"

By the way I gestured towards him, I might've given off the impression that I was going to strangle him to death with the gold cross around his neck; he threw his hands up in the air. "Okay, okay, I get it, you're on duty," he said. "I'm serious, we need to talk, though. Come meet me outside next time you got a smoke break... after you bring me my food, I wasn't kidding. I ain't eaten in damn close to three days."

* * *

My break came an hour later; Luis was loitering out back, working his way through a pack of cigarettes to pass the time. "You still here?" I asked, wiping my hands off on my apron. "I didn't really expect you to be."

"Okay," he said, unable to keep the amusement from bubbling up into his voice, "you have to tell me what you're doin' at this joint, girl. I mean... fucking _Jay's_. Darry give you the choice between this or peddlin' your ass outside the Dingo, y'all that hard up for rent money?"

"Dingo got burned down last year, genius." I rolled my eyes as I slumped against the exposed brick wall of the diner, pulled my pack of American Spirits out of my purse. "I'm savin' up for a car."

You'd think that once Soda deployed to Vietnam, and therefore had no more use for his truck, its ownership would naturally transfer over to his siblings— perhaps, even more naturally, the sibling who was of driving age and had her license. I thought wrong. "I don't trust you on your own two legs, Jasmine, much less a set of wheels," Darry had said, and worst of all, I couldn't even dispute the judgement.

"So can I—" Ponyboy had cut in, the little opportunist. I could've strangled him, but hell, if I wouldn't have done the same in his position.

"Judy can use it," he said, with the self-satisfaction of King Solomon offering to split a baby in half. "Damn, Dad said if Soda and I wanted cars, we could get jobs and earn the money for them. Fair's fair, ain't it?"

And here I was, at Jay's for the second summer in a row, saving my paychecks in the hope that I might scrounge up enough for some rustbucket. A few times, I'd let my mind flit towards thoughts of college, then dismissed it as a flight of fancy more suited to Ponyboy; despite what Mr. Anderson told me back in tenth grade, I was well-aware that even with a scholarship I couldn't finance anything of the sort, and that Darry was hardly chomping at the bit to send me. I'd marry, if not Bryon, someone similar, have his children, keep my husband's house the same way my mama had— my fate stretched out in front of me, a long wasteland. She wasn't around anymore for me to question her, ask if she wanted to go back to school or if after years of dealing with my daddy's exploits, washing dishes was a welcome reprieve.

Luis reached out to touch me, swept away some of the hair that had fallen from my ponytail. I didn't cringe away, just let him do it with an impassive face. "You like the kind of wages you're makin' here?"

"I like not havin' every pervert in Tulsa make eyes at me," I said, staring off into the clear blue sky— the sort that promised rain later, just out of sheer spite. I hoped he'd take the hint, but whether it was a lack of self-awareness or just a lack of shame, he didn't.

"You really hurt my feelings," he said with a hint of a pout, "all that shit about me not bein' wanted down in Mexico. My little cousins are always pretty eager for any Mickey Mouse merchandise I can get my hands on."

I wasn't wrong; Luis might've been hot shit around here, controlled nearly all of the dope in the city, but he was still a small town, Okie drug dealer compared to the scene in Ciudad Juárez, which had more than a million people. _I feel like fuckin' Alexander the Great_ , he'd told me outside the courthouse last year, smug like a cat who'd gotten the cream. No wonder he'd rapidly grown restless, wanted to expand his horizons even further, he was in endless motion. "Can you ever get to the point? What revelations did you come to over there, exactly, that you couldn't even wait until I was off my shift?"

"Ain't you heard, doll? It's 1967, Summer of Love, they're callin' it over in Haight-Ashbury." I didn't like the way he looked at me when he said that. "Horse is real passé now, that's not what the hippie kids are into, and their parents' pockets are deep. New drug on the street is acid."

"And what would I know about hippie kids?" They were around even back when I was slinging, but those had never been my kind of kicks; my mind conjured up visions of rich white kids in badly tie-dyed shirts, joints between their fingers, protesting a war they were at no risk for being drafted into. "I look like I want to link arms and sing _This Land is Your Land_ in someone's VW Beetle?"

" _I've roamed and rambled, and I've followed my footsteps, to the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts_ —" I was starting to wonder if Luis hadn't mixed some pot into those cigarettes. "You support our actions in Vietnam, then?"

"If I say yes, are you gonna start singin' bars from _Eve of Destruction_ next?" Luis, a peacenik. It would've been a more convincing charade if he didn't have a pistol strapped to his hip.

"Your daddy wouldn't have." He spat on the ground, real casual, like he didn't know the impact those words would have on me. Like he wasn't echoing what Darry had thrown at Soda when he came home a few days after his birthday, puffed up and proud as hell, saying Dad had fought in the south Pacific. _You think our union rabble-rousing, IWW card-carrying, Indian nationalist daddy would cheer you on while you're shooting gooks in the jungle?_ It was the first political opinion I'd ever heard him express that didn't make him sound like he was canvassing for Barry Goldwater. "I remember that much about him."

"My brother's in Nam," I said, "I feel like it'd be a little hypocritical for me to start rootin' against him." I hated the war, because it had taken Soda away from us, but he hadn't gotten drafted— he enlisted all on his own. If I thought too hard about it, the only person I would have left to hate was Soda himself. "Walter Cronkite talks about this stuff every night on CBS, if you're interested in politics now."

"I just need you to do me a favor." How nice, he'd finally managed to start approaching the point. "Hit up one of those hippie joints and sniff around there. See what they're droppin' or smokin' or snortin', where they're gettin' it from, how these outfits operate— they're gonna be a lot more willing to share trade secrets with some cute-lookin' teenage girl than with me. But get some new clothes first, before they think you're an undercover cop."

"And what's in it for me?"

"I'll take you out on a date."

My response was immediate. "Fuck you."

"If you insist, but damn, I usually pay for a meal first." He shrugged; I, for the second time, considered whether or not strangling him with that chain would be justifiable homicide, and settled for flipping him off. "I'll make it worth your while, okay? Give you a bigger cut of profits than Dallas did, at the very least."

I pressed the back of my skull against the brick wall and lit another cigarette, let the smoke curl around my head without saying anything. Partly because even after all this time, the mention of Dallas still made my stomach twist into complicated knots, a storm of unfocused thoughts raging through my mind. Partly because if Luis kept pressing, or maybe even if he didn't, I would say yes now that I'd saved face and given him a hard time first. I hated when he said it, but he just knew me too well.

* * *

When I went over to Sylvia's after my shift ended, unwilling to hurry home to Judy cooing over baby name books, she wasn't the one who answered the door. "Hi, Jasmine," her mama said distractedly, her hair half in rollers as she was getting ready to go to work; she and Mrs. Mathews served at the same bar. She dressed a lot like her daughter— a couple years ago, Sylvia used to take half her skimpy clothes out of her closet— and looked a lot like her too, though with darker hair that showed at the roots. She was fond of me because back in second grade, I was a good influence; I detested her, though I had enough home training not to show it. "Ain't seen you around much lately."

"Can't imagine why," Sylvia bawled as she stalked into the hallway, grabbed me by the arm without so much as a greeting— we didn't need them. " _Don't_ talk to me," she added before Ida got a word in at her, holding a hand up. "Don't even fucking look at me."

"Ain't my fault you can't keep a man longer than twenty minutes," Ida shot back, her fist already clenched and ready to go. I'd seen them literally roll around on the carpet together before, like two sisters fighting over the same boy, which made a sad amount of sense— Ida had popped out both of her kids before her eighteenth birthday. "Don't fuckin' sass me in front of your lil' friend, Sylvia Mae. He was too old for you, anyway, I did you a favor."

"And just right for you, I guess," Sylvia said with disgust dripping from her tone, "if you pretend you ain't on the wrong side of thirty. S'ppose you think your slutty makeup's got the guys fooled—"

Ida tried to slap her and narrowly missed the tip of my nose, which was when Sylvia pulled me into her room and slammed the door hard enough to knock her John Lennon poster off the wall. (Gun to my head, my favorite was George, he had the best haircut. In later years, once they all had solo careers, I'd be vindicated.) "Will Taggert and I are history," she said unnecessarily. "What happened to you, huh? You look like you've seen a ghost."

I gave her the abridged version, but even that was enough that once I finished telling her, she reached inside her pillowcase for the grass and rolling papers she kept there. "Listen, you're not gonna do what Luis asked?"

"... No?"

Fear flitted across her face like a shadow. She picked a piece of peeling dry skin from her wrist, the remnant of a sunburn, then she elbowed me in the gut, hard. If she wasn't my best friend, I would've socked her right back. "He's a fucking creep."

"Yeah, I'm well-aware—"

"Are you, though?" I didn't like the way she looked at me, as incisive as a surgeon's scalpel. "He don't care about you," she went on, the THC making her bold as brass, "if he did, he sure as hell wouldn't want you to be doin' his dirty work. He's playin' some kind of angle, so he won't be the one knee-deep in shit if this blows up—"

"Why," I started boredly, already wishing I was more high once she'd passed me the joint, "are you givin' me this lecture like I'm in love with him?"

" _Are_ you?"

My mouth hung open like a cartoon character's, and my stupor was the only thing keeping me from giving her that return punch; I might've broken out of it, if we hadn't been interrupted. "Hey, Syl." Nate gave the doorframe a perfunctory knock— he was still shirtless and dressed in plaid pajama pants, though it was creeping on two o'clock already. He was handsome, I had to admit it, he and his sister had gotten their good looks from their shared mama, but his heavy-lidded eyes and sluggish body language took away from whatever sex appeal he'd once held for me. "You got any shrooms?"

"Thought you were rehearsing today," Sylvia said, flexing her toes; they shone in the sunlight coming in from the window, wet crimson ribbons. Nate and a couple of other guys from Tim's crew, in their off-time from selling drugs, had decided that forming a Doors cover band was going to be their way out of the hood. I couldn't say it was a raging success yet, or even a moderate one. "Didn't hear Mom complainin' about the noise level yet, though, so—"

"Mom likes my music," he said defensively, and she rolled her eyes high enough that all I could see were the whites. "And I told you, they help me focus." He'd need to straight-up snort cocaine for that; he pointed at the other posters dotting Sylvia's walls. "You know how much acid them Beatles are droppin' between sets?"

"If I had any shrooms or acid, you think I'd hand them over to you for free?" She blew a mouthful of smoke at his face; he tossed a pillow from her bed in her direction and cussed her pretty good before stalking out. Brothers were the same everywhere. "Christ hell he's a pain."

"You do that stuff now?" I asked, more out of surprise than anything. It just didn't seem like her speed, Sylvia was no hippie chick. "Magic mushrooms?"

"Not on the regular." She played with the ends of her hair, blunted from a recent cut. "Nate and a couple of his 'bandmates' gave me some, a few times, Evie and I did it with them. It's pretty groovy— I've never picked them up myself, though, I don't even know where they got it from."

Hell, was I apparently now behind on the times, and for a second, I felt a little hurt, that she was doing that with Evie and not me. I channeled that feeling into something more productive, before I could dwell on it— taking advantage of the opportunity that had fallen into my lap.

* * *

"Hey, Nate," I said as I wandered into the kitchen, stoned as hell and starving; he was swirling his spoon around in a bowl of soggy cereal, absently, like his body was there but his mind was gone. My mouth was cottony like I'd been chewing on a handful of wool. I wondered if Ida would toss me out on my ass if I took a bite out of that fried chicken leg in the fridge, then remembered what her two children and last boyfriend were like, and abandoned the thought.

He yawned and stretched like a cat, scratched the thatch of wiry hair on his chest. "Yeah?"

"You doin' shrooms?"

"Yeah," he said again with the faintest tinge of condescension, "who ain't, these days?" He walked over to the open fridge, pulled out a carton of orange juice with frayed edges, and took a long gulp before putting it back. "Why else would I be askin' Sylvia if she's got 'em, then?"

"What's it like?" I was asking out of genuine curiosity, I'd never actually done them myself. No one was really interested, back when I was active in the business, I didn't understand why their popularity had exploded all of a sudden.

"Real nice," he said, looking slightly dreamy, "you get all warm and happy, and you see things— I stared at a wall for two hours straight once, just watched all sorts of neat patterns and shit. And after..." He trailed off. "I dunno. Everything just seems real clear and bright, after you come down. I can't describe it. Like walkin' around downtown when the first snow starts fallin', and the streetlights are on..."

I felt the need to cut him off, before he started waxing even more poetic. "Sounds real tuff." I perched my ass on the table and swung my legs off the edge, smiled at him. "Where d'you get it from? Tim branchin' out into psychedelics now?"

Another guy would've looked at me with some suspicion after I dropped the last bit— I sounded a little too interested for a casual observer, a little too invested in men's business. Nate, fortunately, was not the most perceptive guy on earth. "Oh, nah, I don't even know if this stuff's on Tim's radar," he said guilelessly, and started sifting through the pantry for pre-packaged snacks. "We've been gettin' it from this negro hippie over on the North side, he's got a real racket goin'. His name's Cliff or somethin'? He's always got a flower crown in his hair, you can't miss him."


	3. Pandora's Box

I woke up to the sound of something thumping to the ground. In another neighborhood, that might've been the signal for the man of the house to grab his shotgun, but there was nothing in ours to steal, so I rolled my eyes and headed for the living room. How drunk were Steve or Two-Bit, Lord, that they didn't even remember we kept the place unlocked?

... Well. Turned out the answer was 'Ponyboy' and 'uncertain'. I stood over his prone form with my arms crossed, the way Dad used to when the boys came in at two AM, and wondered where the hell he'd gotten the fringed vest he had on from. Those sure weren't in style on the East side, was he out burglarizing on the West? "Next time, just use the back door," I said conversationally. "I always keep it pretty well-oiled."

He got up with as much dignity as he could muster, trying not to put weight on his busted leg; the moon was full that night, providing enough illumination for me to see his face without turning on a lamp. "Sorry, _Mom_." Then he limped over to the couch and flung himself onto the cushions, with the air of an injured combat veteran. "Is Darry waitin' up?"

"Do you hear him hollerin' at you? He's probably tryna get his sleep in before the baby comes." I stifled a yawn behind my palm. "Where you been?"

"Mind your business," he shot back, the little smartass. He didn't look drunk on second glance, which reassured me, but his eyes were red and scrunched-up like he'd been crying... or smoking up.

"Well, I'm sorry, but when _you're_ keepin' every grass-pushing operation north of Guadalajara in business—"

"Again, you ain't Mom." He'd gotten tougher, my kid brother; I'd never been able to assert the same authority over him that Darry or even Soda could, but in addition to shooting up a damn foot lately, he'd also gained a whole new attitude. "You ain't exactly got room to talk, either."

For a single horrifying second, I considered telling Darry, or at least threatening to. What had I become? "Look, I don't care if you want to drag race or drink at Buck's or whatever. You _know_ I don't care, so if you're lyin' to me, you must really be up to some shit. What happened?"

"All my friends are dead," he said as he leaned his head back against the couch, and my breath caught in my throat. "Or in the slammer, I guess. Tell your boyfriend thanks for that, by the way."

"Jesus Christ—" I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon, I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon, I was not going to get into a fight with Ponyboy over Bryon... "You been sneakin' Cathy out to Lovers' Lane, then?" That was the simplest possible answer, though I was still a little perplexed about the whole pot thing— she didn't seem like the type to be caught dead with a joint, considering what had happened with M&M, but maybe she'd unclenched since she'd started dating him.

"No!" he shrieked, then slapped a hand over his mouth; fortunately, that hadn't woken Darry up either. "We ain't doin' nothin' like that!"

I stared at him suspiciously. "Wait a minute, you _ain't_?"

" _How is this your business_?"

I continued goggling. It wasn't like I wanted to picture my baby brother getting down and dirty, okay, but they'd been an item for months now— on _this_ side of the tracks? He wasn't that young, he'd be sixteen at the end of July, and Cathy was a full year older. "Darry gave you that talk about puttin' a condom on a banana, right? Birds and the bees?"

He flushed strawberry red. "Dad did, sheesh, I was thirteen before he died, not three." I stifled a cackle behind my fist at that; from what I gathered, the old man was not exactly the most euphemistic delivering those lectures. "He didn't have to, though. Cathy and I are waitin' until marriage."

"... Excuse me?"

"We're waitin' until marriage," he said again, with no small amount of irritation. "The way you're supposed to."

(No, it still didn't click for me. I assumed he'd taken our mother's sermonizing a little too much to heart— far more than she herself ever had— or that he'd been scared shitless by the Soda and Sandy situation. Both of those seemed like far more reasonable assumptions, at the time.)

"And you better not start spreadin' that around," he went on before I could get a word in edgewise. "We got somethin' real special and deep, okay, it's not some cheap physical deal that'll be over once we get bored. I don't need to take any static about it."

All right, I got the message, Cathy had found the only guy on the East side who didn't so much as want a handjob out of her. "Yeah, I understand the concept, Pastor Ponyboy—" the look he shot me was about enough to kill me stone dead— "that still don't answer my question, though. You ain't smokin' grass with your girlfriend, you must be smokin' it with someone else. They got a name?"

"Look—" he must've felt guilty enough to try to console me— "Jas, I'm not up to any trouble, okay? I mean... the criminal kind, anyway. Besides the grass, and that don't really count."

"Can't you hang out with Steve and Two-Bit?" Sure, they were pretty wild themselves, but I trusted them to watch Pony's back, more than some mysterious strangers I'd never met. "They're both your friends... and alive, last I checked."

"They're Soda's friends," he said dismissively; I couldn't really protest the point when I'd made it myself before, "they don't want me hangin' around like some kid brother Mom made them bring along. And my new ones ain't criminals, for the last time. You just wouldn't get them."

"Fine, you know what, I give up," I acquiesced, taking a look at the grandfather clock and noticing just how late it was; I didn't have work the next day, but I didn't want to field questions about the bags under my eyes at breakfast, either. "You're right, I'm about the last person who should start lecturin'. But if Darry catches you on anything harder than grass and makes you cut a switch from out back, that's not gonna be on me."

"Oh please, even Dad never made us do that." He had Darry pegged there, he took Dad's parenting philosophy of 'all bark and no bite' to even more ridiculous heights. "I fucking hate this place," he added so quietly I had to strain to hear him, thought maybe I'd misheard him at first. "I just.. Christ, I don't belong here at all. I'm not gonna live in this shitty neighborhood my whole life."

"You? The folk hero?" I asked, trying to play it off; the bitterness in his voice spooked me, reminded me of Steve, whenever he spoke about his father. "You couldn't be more of a celebrity on the East side, hotshot, and you think you don't fit—"

"Do you always have to turn everythin' into some kind of joke, Jas?" I didn't have an answer to that; I hadn't even realized that he'd wanted to confide in me. Before I could say anything, apologize, maybe, he stood up and was heading back down the hall, to the room he'd once shared with Soda, that now lay empty.

* * *

Curly was sprawled across the couch on his cousin's lawn when I approached.

Like all the Shepards, he was too attractive for his own good; his cheeks had thinned out and he had shot up a head over the last few months, threatening to grow taller than Tim soon. He didn't look so much like the reckless kid my little brother had trailed after growing up, the one who'd fallen off telephone poles and tripped over his own feet in rumbles. Here with the crew he'd been managing, he almost looked like a man.

Luckily for what remained of my brain, he also gave off the indisputable aura of considering himself hot shit. Tim and Luis had cruised down to Ciudad Juárez for a grand total of two and a half months, and you'd think he'd been left in charge of the Federal Reserve, not a pack of JD's that was already half-decimated by Nam, the state pen, and overdoses.

"Hey, Jasmine," he said, cool as you please, as he took a swig from the beer bottle he'd set down; I realized, with the sixth sense I had for this sort of thing, that while his boys were in various phases of unconsciousness, he hadn't had much at all. What else was he starting to mimic from Tim? "Ponyboy ain't here."

My eyes still caught that ridiculous stick-and-poke tattoo on his bicep, _Jasmine_ , the one his cousin Cisco did when they were too drunk to see straight; his stepdaddy had howled with laughter when he noticed it, said he sure didn't envy him the task of explaining that to his next girl. I hadn't anticipated that there would be a next girl. "I know," I lied, "he and Bryon are drag-racin' tonight."

I wouldn't have called Curly the possessive type, the way Dallas had been— he wasn't into leaving hickeys, didn't feel the need to always have his arm around my waist or hand patting my ass— but he was still a _guy_ , at the end of the day, not a hippie into free love. I knew going steady with Bryon Douglas would piss him off. Judging by the way his eyes flashed at the mention of his name, I wasn't too far off the mark. He raised his hand and stood up from the couch, had the good grace to lead us over to the side of the house, half-shrouded in shadow and away from his boys' eager ears.

"He's usin' you for sex," he tried to say boredly, but he'd never been able to lie to me so well. "That's his MO, in case you haven't noticed."

"You got any lines you ain't already worn out when I was runnin' around with Dally?"

"He threw his own brother into the state pen," Curly said, and his jaw clenched with a cord of muscle that hadn't been there before. "That tells me everything I need to know 'bout him. Snitch ain't no fuckin' kind of man."

"You're right," I drawled. "I should've stuck with a real man like you, who jumps eighth graders."

I thought he might try to defend himself again, like he had before, futilely, but instead he just pulled his switchblade out and started twirling it in his hand. "Why are you here?"

I wanted to confide in him, about what Luis had asked me to do, but that wasn't what came out. "Heard you were at Jay's with Ximena Lopez, a couple weeks ago." I tried to keep my voice as noncommittal as possible, like I'd heard he'd picked out a blue shirt to wear that night, but it was a futile attempt from the start. I was lying. I'd seen them myself.

"Uh-huh," he said. "What about it?"

"That's... real weird, Curly." Out of all the problems I had with this situation, that wasn't my biggest, but it was the first one that sprang to mind. "You're... dating your brother's girlfriend's sister?"

"What'd you think, Jas?" He smiled like a knife, sliced through my pretense. "I'd stay hung up on you forever, waitin' for you to finally pick me? Just because we were each other's firsts?"

The truth lurched up into my throat the way vomit would— I barely held it back. "You changed—"

" _Changed_?" He snapped the switch into itself again, shoved it back inside the pocket of his cargo shorts. "Hell, Douglas might be a better bet, if that's what you're holdin' out for. Or a West sider. This is who I've always been."

I didn't understand what had gotten into me— I'd certainly never tried to reform Dallas, and I would've been hard-pressed to say any of Curly's moral transgressions were worse than his. Shit, Ponyboy had said it himself in that theme of his, that he was a tough, cool, hard-as-nails Tim in miniature. But I couldn't shake it, _you ain't a thug, Curly. This ain't you._

* * *

"You sure you want to come here?" Bryon asked; I cracked open the car door, felt humidity seep into my skin from the warm summer night. He was looking at me funny, his brow slightly crinkled. "You never want to come to Buck's."

"My brothers don't like me or Ponyboy comin' to the roadhouse," I said, the lie slipping off my tongue as smooth as butter— Soda was long gone, and Darry's disapproval had never stopped me from doing much worse. The real reason why I didn't like Buck's was that every time I turned around, I expected Dallas to be there. I smoothed my skirt over my thighs and laughed, already a little buzzed from the whiskey we'd polished off on the drive. "You afraid of them now?"

"Nah," he said, cracking a rare but easy grin, "you know Darry's a big fan of mine." Not that it was exactly an uphill battle, to win his approval. All Darry had wanted to hear was that Bryon didn't sell drugs, didn't have a criminal record, and didn't slap me around, and he dug him okay.

My plans to knock back a few, however, were dashed about ten seconds after I walked into the establishment— Grace Mathews had sure grown up from the twelve-year-old kid I used to babysit. Dressed in a jean skirt and a top that barely ended below her breasts, she bounded up to me, then surreptitiously tried to hide the lace of her bra where one of them had fallen out. I wanted to put a sweater on her.

"Jasmine!" she squealed, spilling some of the beer in her hand down her wrist; lifting it up, managed to spill even more onto the grimy floor. One of her false eyelashes had come loose. "I didn't think you'd be here!"

She swayed to the music, some Nancy and Frank Sinatra song that was popular this month. "Didn't think you'd be, either," I said, but the sardonic quality of my voice sailed right over her head. I lowered it and turned to Bryon— "shit, should we take her home?"

"She's fourteen or somethin', ain't she? If I dragged M&M home every time I found him—" He cut himself off abruptly. "You know what, on second thought..."

We were spared the responsibility of making a decision when Two-Bit himself sauntered over to us, a vodka shot in one hand, already unsteady on his feet. "Keith!" Grace shrieked as she caught sight of him; I stifled a laugh behind my fist at the face he made at his given name. "You look funny!"

That would be the glitter sparkling in his auburn hair and sideburns; he grabbed a wooden beam on the ceiling to steady himself, blinked twice, and got a good look at her. "What the hell are you doin' here?" he demanded, and I tried not to snicker again. Big brothers were the same any way you sliced them. "Wearin'... is that supposed to be a top? Christ, I'm takin' you home."

As drunk as she was, Grace had enough low cunning to know how to get her own way. "Mama's gonna be there, she don't work tonight," she said. "Do _you_ wanna go home?"

"I'm almost twenty years old, I don't have no damn curfew—" She arched an eyebrow at him, and he caved. "Fine. Stay somewhere I can see you, at least—"

She was off like a shot, and he didn't even bother to pursue her, just turned his attention over to Bryon. "So you're that kid who got his brother sent to the state pen."

"That'd be me, yeah," Bryon said less drily than I'd expected. "And he wasn't my brother."

Two-Bit looked him up and down with thinly-veiled hostility. "I liked Dally and Curly, so I cut them a break, but I don't know your ass from a hole from the ground and I don't like what I do know. I grew up with Jasmine, she's practically my sister, so you wanna try to cop that same attitude with—"

"I swear to God, Two-Bit, if you don't drop the big brother act—" I groaned, my cheeks tinged with red, and not from any of the alcohol I'd had or the heat of the crowded room. One side effect of growing up in a house full of boys? They all thought it was their God-given right to threaten the hell out of any guy interested in me.

"It's fine," Bryon said, again with more good grace than I'd expected him to have, though the irritated twitch of his mouth said otherwise. "I'm gonna go say hi to Terry for a minute, okay?"

I strongly suspected the guy he flagged down from across the dimly-lit room was an acquaintance, at best, not that I blamed him for high-tailing it out of there. The second he was out of earshot, I turned on Two-Bit. "What's got you in such a pissy mood tonight, huh?" You could fault him for a lot, but not his bad temper, usually. "Can't just be findin' Gracie here."

He didn't answer me before he'd shuddered down another shot, his lips pursed from the straight vodka. "Kathy broke up with me."

"Hell, I'm sorry," I said, and meant it— she and Two-Bit had been on and off for a couple of years now, but out of all his many blondes, she was the one he'd held onto the longest. "What happened?"

"I got drafted." He took his lighter out of his pocket and flicked it over and over again, though he was wasting the fluid. "I guess I should be glad she was honest with me, military guys always get cheated on the second they deploy anyway. Could've come home to her six months pregnant and still claimin' it's my baby."

"Fuck."

"Yeah." He took a shuddery breath, like he was inhaling through a straw. "Don't tell Grace or my mama yet, I'm still workin' on my delivery." He tried to crack a grin. " _So, Ma, you always were buggin' me to finally get a job— and now I'm moving outta your house, too_ —

"Don't, don't try to make it funny." Was this going to be the rest of my life? Watching the boys I'd grown up with get plucked away one by one, sent home in a casket? "Can't you... aren't you gonna try to dodge somehow?"

"Nah, doll, I don't really see any way out." His eyes were full of sympathy as he reached out to touch my arm, like I was the one who needed to be comforted right now. "I ain't got a felony charge, and seems like knockin' some broad up is more trouble than it's worth... no offense to Superman, but I sure ain't ready to be nobody's daddy yet."

I exhaled heavily and told myself I wouldn't cry, not here, not when Two-Bit was facing a one-way ticket to Nam. He still noticed, though, before I could blink the tears away— he was more observant than most of us gave him credit for. "Don't be upset, Jas, Soda's doin' fine, ain't he?" I didn't have the heart to tell him that we hadn't heard from him in months. "And what does everyone always say, chicks dig a man in uniform." When I didn't look any happier, he sighed himself and stared down at the empty glass in his hand. "Hell, I don't even believe what I'm sayin'. You want to do shots?"

* * *

Part of the reason I left the house so early Sunday morning was so that Darry didn't catch me hungover as a fucking dog— he was long past the point where he accepted 'migraine' or 'food poisoning' as cover stories. The sunlight blared into my eyes; I fought the urge to vomit into the bushes as I got off my bus and walked along the bodegas and graffiti-marked walls, the left side of my head pounding like I was being attacked with a sledgehammer. Christ, fuck Luis with a tennis racket, I wanted at least a sixty percent cut of the profits from this.

The search involved less effort than I'd anticipated, though— I figured that if we had plenty of hippies in the parks on the East side, the North shouldn't have been much different. I found Cliff outside a pale green Volkswagen bus, a joint in hand; I knew he was the leader without being told, just by the way he carried himself, even sitting slumped on its steps. He blew out some smoke as I approached; he really did have a flower crown resting on top of his braids, the kind Sylvia and I made at recess as kids. "Hey, sister," he said, his dark eyes surprisingly clear and lucid as he examined me. Eyes that looked like they understood me, without us having to have exchanged a single word. "You ever had your palm read?"

I didn't even know what that was. "My friend Nate—" I tried to mimic the airy, vacant lilt of his voice and only succeeded at sounding trashed. "He said you had some magic mushrooms?"

He tilted his head at me. "Are you an Aries?"

I had to do some quick mental calculations. "I'm an... Aquarius, I think?" That was what I had gotten in the Tiger Beat quiz Sylvia made me take, anyway.

"Huh," he said, flicked some ash onto the long grass at our feet. "Took you for a fire sign, maybe earth. Definitely not an air. You're real _direct_ , ain't you?"

Well, he had me pegged there— I'd always been known for favoring the direct approach, which made me, in hindsight, a damn poor choice for infiltrating a hippie commune. I must have shown my consternation on my face, because then he smiled at me. "Hey, I'm just messin' with you," he said gently, and that smile made me want to leave my weapons at the door. "I know Nate, he's a cool cat. You should come inside, yeah?"

The interior of the bus was larger than I expected— dreamcatchers hung all over the walls, a kaleidoscope of light and color, bright rugs covering the floor. The scent of marijuana smoke and something different, sharper and more acrid, clung to me like a dense fog; a ring of hippies in tie-dye shirts were lounging on the floor as someone played the ukulele— shit, was that Randy Adderson? Ponyboy's weird friend? At least he'd shaved off that mustache/beard combo he had through '66, he'd looked like he had an otter nesting on his face.

And when I gave the scene a slightly longer look, there was my baby brother on a worn mattress, a flower painted onto his left cheek, looking stoned as hell as he sang along to _Sunshine of Your Love_. Oh, Christ hell.

He grinned at me sheepishly, too high to feel any real embarrassment or trepidation. "Hey, Jas," he said with a little wave. "Uh... guess I won't tell if you don't?"


	4. Comfortably Numb

"You know each other, Ponykid?" Cliff leaned against the wall, almost knocking one of the dreamcatchers off. His slight smile said that he was in on a joke we didn't understand.

It startled me, to hear Dad's old nickname coming out of this hippie's mouth; I didn't need Ponyboy himself to tell me that they weren't meeting for the first time. "Yeah, she's my big sister," he said with bright enthusiasm— more enthusiasm than he'd ever exclaimed that with before. He waved his hand around and almost toppled over, face first. "I mean, a real one, not one from here. Jas, you want to sing too?"

My smile was better described as a rictus. "I'd rather not."

"They're your real sisters," Cliff told him. "Spiritually, anyway."

I didn't even know how to respond to that; Mom told us that when Uncle Gene had his delusions, we had to strike a balance between feeding into them and upsetting him more with denials, so I decided to take a similar tack and just ignore him. The mingled smells of incense and grass were only exacerbating my headache; I pressed my fingertips up to my temples. "This is Blossom," Ponyboy said, pointing at a girl with blonde hair like gossamer, "and you've met Randy already—"

I tried my damndest to make that smile look less like a grimace; he just tipped his ukulele at me. What was his angle with my brother? What was a rich white guy like him doing here, in the poorest part of Tulsa, getting stoned on the floor of a grimy VW bus with colored people? I couldn't read him at all, not when he looked up at me through eyelashes too long and pretty for a boy's, and the mildness of his expression maddened me even further. He took in my anger and reflected it back at me, like a mirror.

I couldn't afford to rage like a bull in a china shop, though, and more than that, the role of nagging big sister weighed uncomfortably on me. Okay, hell, Ponyboy was a hippie now— so he sat around, smoked grass, and sang shitty protest songs. If I was really being honest with myself, as corny as I found all this junk, it seemed pretty harmless compared to his surrogate brothers' brand of trouble, the kind that carried the promise of hard time with it. "You said you wanted some shrooms?" Cliff reminded me. "How many?"

Shit, like I even knew what units they were sold in. "How much are you chargin' per... ounce?" I gave it my best educated guess.

His Cheshire cat grin only widened. I'd guessed wrong. "I don't sell anything." Excuse me? "I don't believe in commodifying a plant that came from the earth." _Excuse me?_ "How many do you want?"

"... One?"

Ponyboy laughed in my face. Randy had enough Soc-bred manners to refrain from that much, but the way the corner of his mouth twitched, ever so slightly, annoyed me even more. "Yeah, that'll do it," Ponyboy kept on cackling. "Ain't you supposed to be the expert on this kind of stuff?"

Cliff cut him off by raising his hand; Ponyboy snapped his mouth shut, like he was obeying the instructions of a preschool teacher. "I didn't know it was your first time," he said with kind concern. "Listen... if you're gonna trip, you're better off doin' it here, with us. Psychedelics, they can be pretty intense. It's not a journey you should be goin' on alone."

 _That seem like the brightest idea, princess?_ Dallas materialized in front of me, my mental image of him was so strong— his arms crossed over his chest, the tip of his nose turned up, as elfin as always. _Takin' some plant you don't know the effects of, in front of some weirdo you ain't known a day in your life, either? Boy howdy, and Darry said Ponyboy was the one who never used his head._

I'd been furious at him for dying, but in his own way, he was protecting me even now. I didn't so much like the sound of _I don't sell anything_ — in my world, there was no such thing as not expecting _quid pro quo_. If Cliff didn't want money from me, well, there was really only one thing I had left to offer. But if he'd intended to have his way with me, he probably wouldn't try it in full view of multiple eyewitnesses, including my kid brother, either— he didn't seem unintelligent, he'd have a little more finesse than that. And if I was going to gain their trust, it wouldn't be the smartest move in the world to already telegraph my suspicion.

Cliff took my silence as tacit agreement; he pressed a few shriveled, beige somethings into my palm, that might've been a mushroom a glass of water ago. I stared down at it. "Blossom, get her some of them Oreos from the kitchen," he commanded, and she hopped right up; I was surprised a cookie with that many preservatives and artificial flavorings would be allowed in their compound. "You eat that with it, one right after the other," he said once Blossom dropped two on the carpet beside me. "They don't exactly taste good."

They were all staring at me with glassy-eyed eagerness. I raised my hand up to my mouth, feeling like Eve in the Garden of Eden, like Persephone eating six pomegranate seeds. Like after I had taken the bite, I would have done something that couldn't be taken back. Crumbs sprayed all over the front of my blouse.

* * *

"Wow, I feel _good_ ," I said for what must've been the millionth time, spinning around in a circle the way I had as a little kid, just for the pleasure of getting dizzy. "I feel _so_ good. Pony, why didn't you tell me 'bout this stuff before?"

My entire body was as warm and smooth as a pat of melted butter on a pancake; my limbs moved like liquid, no resistance to them at all. I couldn't stop giggling, the edges of the world dulled and fuzzy. Randy was trying to translate one of the songs off that brand new Beatles record, _Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds_ , onto the ukulele, which he wasn't doing particularly well. I didn't even mind.

"I never knew you could see so many patterns." I elbowed Ponyboy, hard, when I plopped down next to him, then rolled onto my back, like a turtle that had been flipped over onto its shell. " _Look_. The tapestry's moving." I was transfixed; I'd never seen anything more interesting than the way its threads swam around. "Was it movin' before?"

"No," Ponyboy said with the exasperated amusement you used on kindergarteners, "it ain't movin' at all." He was sucking on the end of a roach, the thin rolling paper dissolving in his mouth. "Man, I told you that six times already."

"He always such a buzzkill?" I asked the sprawled, broken circle of hippies. "I thought he was only like that at home."

"Awh, we don't mind havin' him here." Randy wrapped an arm around his shoulders, smushing him into his side. "I always wanted a kid brother."

Ponyboy scowled more deeply than I thought anyone could that stoned, ducked his head before Randy could ruffle his hair. "I ain't some kid— wait, what time is it?"

Cliff glanced at the cuckoo clock hanging on the wall; it had probably once been as bright and gaudy as anything else in the caravan, but the paint was all faded now, like a circus prop left out in the rain. "Five or somethin', I reckon? Think that clock's always off by half an hour..."

"Shit." Ponyboy stood up abruptly. "Cliff, listen, I gotta take her home. We shouldn't have stayed out this long."

"What's the rush?" Cliff asked as he pulled the blinds on one of the windows open; sunlight streamed in and illuminated half of his face, like he was an angel in a Renaissance painting. "She just got here."

"I don't want to go home," I said, though I wasn't sure why— the thought didn't fill me with any particular trepidation. The whole world seemed placid and good in that moment, like floating in a pool on your back, eyes half-closed, on a hot summer day. "Why would we go home?"

"Snap out of it." He actually snapped his fingers in front of my face— that was about enough to knock me out of my trance. "We still live with Darry, remember? Darry, who ain't exactly what I'd call a hippie. Who's gonna wonder where we're at."

"Darry used to smoke grass on the porch with Dad all the time." I was talking to myself more than to him. "When'd _he_ become such a buzzkill?"

"I know," Ponyboy said as he hauled me up by the arm— since when could he do that so easily? "Darry got to do everything with Dad, even though he didn't want to." He sounded less upset about it than matter-of-fact, maybe a little wistful. "C'mon, we gotta go, okay? Maybe I can get you into bed before he makes us have dinner."

"How'd you get here?" Randy asked, turning his head behind his back to face us.

"I don't know how she did, I took the bus—"

"You can't take the bus," he said with firm conviction, "not when she's still trippin' so much... come on, I'll drive y'all home."

So Ponyboy bundled me into Randy's backseat, which stank of patchouli and had some terrible folk music playing on the radio. I figured it'd be pretty rude to ask him to change the station, though, since it wasn't my car and all. "You can buckle your own seatbelt, right?" he asked a little more sarcastically than I thought I deserved. If I'd been any less high, I would've flipped him off, but as he crawled into shotgun and Randy pulled away from the park, I almost fell asleep, my head lolling against the window as north Tulsa faded into the more familiar landscape of the east.

"... She's good people?" woke me back up, maybe twenty minutes away from home.

"She's my sister, ain't she?" Ponyboy said like that made it self-evident, and a small stirring of love gathered beneath my breastbone. "I didn't invite her— I don't even know how she found us."

"You know this is illegal, right. If the wrong person finds out and narks—"

"No, man, I had no idea—"

"Well, you already knew you're a smartass," Randy said, but with a touch of fondness to it. "And don't smoke those cancer sticks in my car."

"This car smells like you've got a whole grass-growin' operation in the trunk, my cancer stick's practically an air freshener."

"Grass—" I got the sense they'd had this argument before— "is harmless. You choke down more cigarettes a day than a fifty-year-old emphysema patient." Ponyboy scoffed, but he still stubbed it out on the window and shoved his pack back into the pocket of his shorts. "Cliff sure liked her. He would've sent her on her way if he didn't."

* * *

I was about sober enough to sit up straight at the dinner table that night, but not to make coherent conversation. Fortunately, Darry was too busy with his favorite target to waste any energy on me finding patterns in the light refraction off our water glasses. "You said you'd be home by three, kiddo—" he tapped the handle of his knife on the table. "I was gonna time you around the track, remember? And where were you, nowhere to be found."

"I forgot," Ponyboy said without any apology— when had he lost his fear of Darry's disapproval? Lied smooth as a bowl of cream, too, when he added, "I was with Cathy, helpin' her look after her kid siblings."

Darry heaved the lengthy sigh we both knew was the precursor to a good lecture. My fork felt like it was melting in my hand, I struggled to remember how to twirl spaghetti around one. "Cathy's a real nice girl, and don't I know lookin' after kid siblings," he started, "but she's distractin' you from what's really important— your future. I don't like you runnin' around the streets all day, anyway, nothing else goin' on, gettin' into trouble. If you won't bother to train for track, you should be workin' through that new SAT book I bought you. What happened to it anyway?"

At least five of its pages had been turned into paper airplanes by Two-Bit, last time he was over at our place— and I swallowed bile remembering the news he'd given me last night. Did either of them know yet? Was I going to have to be the one to tell them? "Awh, Darry, lay off," Ponyboy said between chews on a meatball— Mom never would've let him get away with that, but her standards for table manners had long since vanished from this house. "They say you can't really study for it, and I did pretty good already, didn't I?"

And there it came rushing back, the old insecurity in his voice. "Yeah, hell, you did better than me, little buddy," Darry said, cracking a rare grin— even calling him by Soda's nickname. "Doesn't mean there ain't still room for improvement, though. If you score well enough, you could get a real good scholarship, maybe even a full ride."

I didn't mention that I'd taken it, too, that Mr. Anderson had pushed me to a few months ago and gotten me a waiver for the fee— that even if I was sure I was going exactly nowhere in life, I could at least humor him once. I'd felt nervous and antsy sitting in the auditorium the whole three hours, there weren't half as many girls as guys there, even more nervous and antsy intercepting the mail to make sure I didn't field awkward questions from Darry. My heart nearly burst out of my chest when I read the results, saw the score I'd gotten on the math section. I'd outdone them both.

"Jasmine, are you okay?" Judy was scrutinizing me with a new alertness, one I didn't particularly like— what was this, early-onset mother's intuition? "You look real... out of it."

Pony gave me a panicked stare, Darry turned to look at me like it was the first time he'd noticed me at the table. I swore I saw an octopus floating in Judy's glass, many-limbed and small, twirling around and around—

"Jas?" Darry, this time, sharper and more insistent. "Maybe you should go to bed, you don't look so good. Are you comin' down with somethin'?"

He didn't have to tell me twice; I got up from the table, pushed my chair in, and went down the hall to my room, where I crashed on the bed fully dressed and fell asleep. I didn't wake up for another twelve hours, after having vivid dreams I couldn't recall the next morning. But Nate was right, before I passed out, I lurched with the strangest sensation, like I was looking at the world through a sheet of the clearest ice. Nothing hurt, but not in the numbing way alcohol or barbs took away the pain; when I stared up at the ceiling, I felt the most settled and at peace I had since my parents died, maybe ever, like I'd found the hidden meaning in all the things I'd gone through. If I'd had any sense in my head, a single brain cell still operating at full capacity, I would've been alarmed by that.

* * *

When I woke up again, the first thing I registered was how absolutely exhausted I was, the kind of fatigue that penetrated right to the bone; I didn't know at the time that this was a pretty common side effect of hallucinogens, and for a moment I was paralyzed with the fear that there was something really wrong with me, that I had managed to make myself as sick as M&M and that Darry would wring my neck. Once I got up and realized that I would live, I remembered two things— that I had work that day, and before then, I needed to go see Luis.

"Remind me how you know where I live?" he drawled at me from his kitchen table, tilting a cup of black coffee down his throat with the green tinge of a hangover. His living room had clearly seen better days, perhaps when he first moved in, before they'd started growing marijuana on every available surface— I couldn't make out much else from the decor. "Do I need to change the locks again?"

"Curly took me here a few times, when we wanted to smoke up," I said as I stepped over a pile of dirty boxers— Luis was thirty and kept house worse than any of my teenage brothers.

"Curly thinks he's too big for the _chancla_ now, huh?" He said it without any real heat, though, as he took another sip. "Don't know how many times I've had to tell him to keep his paws out my product, guess the same's gonna have to go for you."

"I did what you asked, yesterday, went over to one of those hippie buses on the North to scope the place out."

If I'd expected him to jump with excitement, I was to be disappointed; he took his sweet time even turning his head towards me. "And what'd you find out, then?"

"You're wastin' your time," I said. "Their leader, Cliff, he wouldn't even charge me for the mushrooms I took with them. They're not like you, they're not serious about any kind of market."

"Am I payin' you to have fun on the clock?" Another joke, he'd become a regular comedian in the time he'd been gone. He walked into the kitchen and fiddled with the coffeepot. "Don't fall for that hippie bullshit. Shouldn't take a genius to figure out why he'd get a pretty girl hooked with free drugs first."

"I'm not on your damn payroll," I insisted, sounding pathetic even to my own ears. "I'm not up to none of that. I'm eatin' magic mushrooms in a shitty bus and then tellin' you all about it. I'm a middle man here, at best."

"Okay," he said with maddening calm, then walked back over to his cluttered kitchen table with another mug. For some reason, that irritated me even more than if he had denied it outright.

"If you've got somethin' to say, then say it—"

"I'm just gettin' a little tired of your moral dilemmas," he said, reaching out to put his fingers around my wrist; they easily overlapped. "Tryna figure out why you're drawn to all this, pretendin' that you're better than the likes of us, somethin' special— it was boring in your daddy and somehow it's worse in you. I could tell you why you're still here."

"Yeah?" His pupils were dilated, I watched him like a snake entranced by a charmer. I wanted to shake free of his grip— I knew how, from the point where his middle finger met his thumb— and somehow couldn't. "And why's that?"

"Because I take you seriously." He let go of me, I stumbled back, still dazed, still watching him. "You gonna drink that coffee before it gets cold? I didn't put rat poison in there."

* * *

Ponyboy walked into the bathroom while I was showering that night— I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but that would be a lie. "Can any of y'all ever _wait_ for longer than ten seconds before you come crashin' in here—"

"You always take forever shavin' your legs, I need to brush my teeth," was his less than polite rejoinder, as he turned the faucet on. That was another lie, because he jumped into the real reason anyway— the sound of running water obscured what we were saying. "You ain't gonna tell—"

I squeezed a quarter-sized amount of shampoo into my palm and lathered before I bothered to answer him. "For the last time, no, I ain't gonna tell him anything. That'd just be mutually assured destruction, I don't need Superman on my case again."

"I didn't mean for you to have such a long trip," he said, "Cliff neither. They're kind of a wild card, you never know what you're gonna get. He shouldn't have given you so much for your first time... we shouldn't have made fun of you."

"You tryna look after me now, baby bro?" I asked as I rinsed my hair out, but with more gentle amusement than I thought I would. "I don't need your babysittin', last I checked—"

"Yeah, you do," he said with enough seriousness to make my ears perk up like a German shepherd's. "Listen, Jas, promise me that you won't drop any of that stuff by yourself. I mean, shrooms are bad enough, but especially acid."

I was just arguing to be contrary at this point, one of my worse traits. "Please, I saw funny patterns in the walls and couldn't stop laughin'— Darry didn't even figure out something was up—"

"I saw somebody walk into traffic once." That stilled my hand as I rubbed soap onto my washcloth. "Aisha thought she had spiders crawlin' all over her body, she ran out into the street like a toddler that got loose from her mama—"

"Okay, okay." Suddenly I didn't need to hear anything else; despite the scalding stream of water from the shower, I still shivered. I rested the back of my head against the slick tile of the shower wall. "I miss Soda. He'd find all this stuff a real gas."

Ponyboy hesitated, long enough that I could try to find meaning in it. "Yeah. Me too."


	5. Don't Look Back in Anger

I had about enough to be getting on with, without having my second pregnancy scare before the age of eighteen on my hands. It took me a few moments to register exactly what had happened after it did, a wet spill on the sheets beside me, Bryon's flushed face, apologies coming off his lips. I really wasn't listening, I was too busy trying to assess how much damage control was needed.

It was only a little bit, I wasn't sure if it was enough to actually settle a baby inside of me. And according to the calendar my mama had taught me to keep, when I was around thirteen, I couldn't get knocked up anyway at this point in my cycle. Still didn't make me any less hacked off about it.

"You said you'd pull out." I hugged one knee to my chest, stretched the other leg out on the bed. I focused on the contrast between my tan lines and my pastier stomach, rather than focusing on him. "If you ain't gonna use a rubber, you better improve your sense of timing—"

"They're real expensive," he said as he tried to comb his mussed hair with his fingers, "they're the price of a single—" He looked genuinely apologetic, which was the worst part of this whole thing. "And it just don't feel as good with one on."

Christ, I was already bored of him— the tighter he tried to cling, the more I wanted to push him away. The attention I'd found flattering at the beginning of our relationship now felt like I was suffocating on chlorine gas. "I don't want to be no seventeen-year-old mother, Bryon."

I just didn't want to be _that_ girl, either, demanding, nagging, always running my mouth— it wasn't like my love life was much of a success story, the way I'd been handling things before. I wasn't stupid, either— if I didn't put out, I was well-aware that it would send Bryon running for the door. It surprised me that he'd wanted to wait this long at all to start doing it, most guys on the East side, they'd move on if their dick wasn't wet by the end of the week, and that was the halfway-respectable kind. Maybe nice, clean Cathy Carlson had gotten to him.

"You're real—" He rubbed the back of his neck like he was scraping rust off a pan, and in the few seconds before he picked the sentence back up again, my heart lurched. "You can... loosen up, you know, make some noise? None of the other girls I've been with—"

I could've told him he was no Dallas Winston himself, who'd had plenty of experience and ego tied up in making women happy, or even Curly, who had no experience at all but made up for it with clumsy enthusiasm, but my tongue twisted in my mouth. I tried to imagine this other string of girls and then immediately shut down that train of thought. "Well, one else ever complained, so—"

"Hey, wait, I didn't mean it as no criticism— it's not like girls have to be good at anything." He put his hand on my upper arm, maybe comforting, maybe restraining, depending on his mood. "I mean, did you hate it? Apart from... you know."

I didn't _hate_ it. "I just don't like it much," I demurred, and that felt pretty satisfactory to me. A lot of girls just didn't like it much, hell, if I'd ever listened to anything my mama said, I wouldn't have liked much to begin with. After all, at the end of the day, it was for your boyfriend, for the two of you to feel closer.

Not that I felt any closer to Bryon. The world blurred in front of me again, distant and syrupy, and I was tired of this, I was so fucking tired of this. I pinched the skin on my upper arm just to stay a little more connected to reality, then swung my legs over the side of the bed and groped around on the floor for my clothes. I needed to change the sheets. "You oughta go home. Darry's got a bad habit of comin' back in before he says he'll be."

"... I'll see you later, yeah?" Despite being so much larger than me, brushing up against six feet if he hadn't already shot past it, he still seemed as small and insecure as a child. He swept closer to me, brushed a lock of sweaty hair behind my ear; my skin crawled, like I'd just noticed an ant that needed to be flicked off. "You ain't mad or nothin', are you?"

Maybe I was just born for the stage or something, because I managed to get out a convincing "yeah, I'll see you," even half of a smile as weak as the sun behind stormclouds. He kissed me, wet and open-mouthed, and I tried to convince myself that I liked it, liked him, until he pulled away. I waited for him to be gone, get his car out of my driveway, before I finally went into the bathroom and indulged in a few sad dry heaves over the toilet.

I was doing everything right. Good grades and not sneaking out and a boyfriend my brothers didn't hate and a steady job, I'd reformed myself, I was back on the right path. So what the hell was still so wrong with me, that I just couldn't manage to exorcise, no matter how hard I tried?

Then I realized what the problem was. I should've probably knocked back a drink or two before I got down to business. I wasn't so used to doing it sober.

* * *

_My first shrink had one helluva crush on me. And I was too dumb to notice until during our third session, he got one of my curls between his fingers, rubbed it, and asked me if I felt like discussing this further at his house over a glass of sherry. The idea that he probably beat off in the shower to the halting details I'd disclosed, I think, qualifies as the very definition of 'adding insult to injury'._

_I actually had enough sense to tell Darry, who proceeded to raise so much unholy hell that the receptionist offered me a half-off deal, if only he didn't file a lawsuit or shoot the place up. My second shrink, I just decided to give it to him straight, lay all my cards out on the table. "Well, my brother and my social worker think that I need to see someone, to talk about all of my issues," I started out with a slow, sweet smile. "My parents died last year in a car wreck, and then I was raped at a party the night of their funeral. Then, uh, I started goin' steady with one of my brothers' shadier friends, and we started sellin' drugs with his friend's sister because we were kind of bored? We were doin' that for a while, until I told her uncle that she had a pimp and started a gang war, and her pimp put out a bounty on my head and kidnapped me so he could rape and kill me. Then my kid brother got caught up on a murder charge and after all that my boyfriend committed suicide by makin' cops shoot him." I leaned back in the chair, looked him dead in the eye. "I drink a lot, too, for someone my age. And I do barbs sometimes. Is that a real serious problem?"_

_I can't even blame him for not taking this too well. It sounds completely absurd written down, I wouldn't have believed me either. He made the appropriate humming noises, scribbled some things down on his clipboard, then laid it all on Darry. I was cl_ _early hypersexual, though that wasn't uncommon for girls with my... particular ethnic background. I was also a compulsive liar, he was a bit 'troubled' by how I could spin these stories without a moment's hesitation. Had Darry considered signing me up for a course of electroshock therapy at Brookhaven? It might do wonders._

_Darry was cussing him right until security hauled him back out the front door. "I'm not so sure this was a good idea, Jas," he finally said once we were back in the car, in the understatement of the year. "These quacks, they just don't seem to know the score around here."_

_I knew what he wanted to say, though he wouldn't— we couldn't afford to have a shrink on retinue, either for me or for Pony, even with a discount. We weren't quite bad off enough to qualify for Medicaid and though Dad had enrolled us all in the tribe, even if Indian Health covered one, he'd probably just offer to lobotomize me with an icepick and call it a day._

_"I mean, you're fine, ain't you." Darry said it as half a plea, put one of his big hands on my thigh and gave me a squeeze I knew he considered reassuring. "You're okay now."_

_It was the beginning of spring at that point, maybe mid-March, the little snow we'd had already melting into crocuses and daffodils. I'd broken up with Curly and slammed Angela's head into the concrete in front of half the school. Sylvia came over for sleepovers sometimes, and more and more often these days. My GPA was a 3.7 and I wasn't in any real trouble after the fight and Margaret said I could have my old job back that summer. I was raised by a daddy from New Mexico and a mama from the heartland of Texas, but I still had enough Midwestern in me that I was uncomfortable spilling my guts to a perfect stranger, about all of the bad things that had happened to me._

_I twisted my skirt in my hands and forced myself to smile. I knew what he wanted to hear, my trust in the psychiatric industry was at an all-time low, and if I'm really being honest, I wanted to convince myself too. "Yeah. I'm okay."_

* * *

I should've realized that Angela and I would cross paths again, eventually— Tulsa was a decent-sized city, but we frequented the same haunts, Buck's, the Ribbon, back streets and dimly-lit parking lots. Even if we never did in the physical sense, it wasn't as if I'd ever be able to forget about her. That theoretical knowledge, though, didn't help the sharp jolt in my stomach when I saw her, like I'd just fallen from the roof of a tall building and hadn't yet reached the ground.

Her hair was the first thing that caught my attention— she was walking around with a cut like Audrey Hepburn's for a while, but it had grown out to the chin-length of a flapper's and she paired it with a headband, too, something I would've thought was too Soc to find its way into her closet. She'd lost weight on an already thin frame, and her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets as she surveyed the scene, for once not flanked by any of her girlfriends. I didn't want to worry if she was back on the heroin— Tim, despite her furious squawking, used to roll up her sleeves and check for track marks, but he'd been gone for several months now and I was all the same. Even with Joe in prison, that old avenue eliminated, she had more than enough access, if she put her mind to it.

"... Was he that bad?" Evie's voice wafted into my ears, I turned my head back towards her again. Her blue minidress rode up on her thighs as she sat down on the hood of her souped-up Chevy— she had a real tuff ride, courtesy of Steve's irresistible urge to steal and tinker with them.

When I didn't answer fast enough for their liking, Sylvia pinched some of the skin on my upper arm. I yelped and gave her an indignant look. "You said you'd tell us about it, 'stead you're just starin' off into space." Contrary to popular perception, girls' bull sessions not only exist, but are a hell of a lot more detailed and scathing than guys'— I'm still scarred from the time I found _Tim Shepherd has a masive cock_ scrawled on a shower stall in the locker room. Wrinkles shaped like twin commas settled between her eyes, as she surveyed me again. "Was he _that_ —"

I blinked hard to get back into the moment. "We—" I almost said _he_ , it would be closer to the truth— "didn't use a rubber."

Evie fixed me with a surprisingly hard look, the kind I'd seen her use on her kid brother, then passed me the flask of cinnamon whiskey she'd stolen from her stepdaddy's liquor cabinet. "Are you stupid?"

I let a sip burn its way down my throat. Holy hell, would this be awful to throw up. "Not sure how much I want to answer that."

"Sorry," she said, not sounding very sorry at all. She and Steve really were a match made in heaven. "But are you fucking stupid? _You know what they call a guy who pulls out? Daddy._ "

"Don't make me feel worse than I already do—"

I didn't want to admit the truth to them. That I hadn't insisted he wrap it up because I didn't want to know what would happen if he forced the issue.

"You're gonna feel a hell of a lot worse if you're knocked up," Sylvia helpfully cut in. "Thought you had more sense than some Catholic school broad— or Angel Shepard, though I don't see much of a difference." She snatched the flask out of my hand. "Well, I mean, guess you gotta get married sooner or later—" I stuck my tongue out at her. "Promise Auntie Sylvia is at least gettin' a middle name in there, if it's a girl?"

I should've expected Angela's head to swivel around when she heard her name mentioned. She strolled right up to us, a cigarette between her fingers, like she didn't have a care in the world. "Yeah, Bryon's like that," she said after a drag. "You better watch out, before he gets you in trouble too."

"Angel, _hey_ ," Sylvia said with such a fake, high-pitched sweetness that it made my ears hurt. "You look great— you know, the baby weight, it just melted _right_ off. I heard it's easier for young mothers to snap back into shape."

Between attacking Pony, who'd been a real celebrity at school ever since the stabbing, and getting knocked up at fifteen, Angela had become as much of a pariah as 'Slutty Sandy' before her— and Sylvia had never been known for her subtlety. Evie didn't bother to say anything, but her disdain was obvious from the way she curled her upper lip. Angela ignored them both, turning to me. "We should talk."

I half-rotated my shoulders towards Sylvia and Evie; they watched me, waiting for my signal. "Just give us a minute," I said, surprising even myself as I waved them aside. "I want to hear what she has to say."

They shot each other some pretty meaningful looks, but they listened to me all the same, shifted on over to another group of girls— leaving me and Angela alone for the first time in months, since I told her to get rid of it. I hated the sight of her, everything about her, especially her certainty that I would forgive her. Especially the fact that I already had.

I couldn't have bit back the cattiness even if I'd tried, when I broke the silence between us, and I wasn't really. "Your husband know you're out so late?"

Even with all of her tough talk, every trauma she'd been through, there had been something faintly ridiculous about Angela, an overwrought theatricality to a kid her age playing the femme fatale. Now she looked halfway to being a woman in her tired resignation, and I was shocked to find something I'd never seen on her face before: defeat. "Jas—" She pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm sixteen, Rafa ain't got no job, and my mama still won't talk to me even though she had _three_ half-Mexican kids outta wedlock. How much more of a pound of flesh do you want to take off me?"

I'd heard the accusation before, more than once. That I had a bad temper, a mean mouth. That I lashed out first and asked questions later. The sin of wrath personified. I didn't see it as such a bad thing. Angela had hurt my brother, which gave me the right to hurt her right back.

"I'm tired of feelin' sorry for you." All I did was feel sorry for Angela, and I hated myself for feeling the tiniest bit of satisfaction too, that after all her scheming she was stuck living in a shitty apartment with some shitty, deadbeat man, running away from her mama just to turn into her. "That don't excuse what you tried to do to Ponyboy. You could've gotten him killed, all because he hurt your pride."

She just raised an eyebrow, and I knew she saw right through me. The truth was that our friendship didn't fall apart because she'd gotten one of Tim's goons to glass Ponyboy, she hadn't even managed to do that right. The truth was that she reminded me of things I desperately wanted to forget.

But like her or not, she still felt like my responsibility. Who else did she have? She couldn't even scrape up a couple members of her former entourage to hang out in a parking lot. "Your husband, is it real bad with him?" I asked begrudgingly. "He don't slap you around or nothin', does he?"

"He don't _hit_ me," she said, cutting her eyes to the side, "Jesus, you think Tim wouldn't have put him in a shallow grave by now if I was walkin' around with Irish sunglasses? I don't need your fussin', all he used to do was show up at my place and ask _how's school, Angel, does that sack of shit you married treat you right, Angel, are you goin' hungry, Angel, you're too thin_ — I ain't exactly lookin' forward to him comin' back from Juárez."

From her voice, it was obvious she was looking forward to it immensely. "Then why are you here? What do you want?"

She shrugged, and the gesture made her look even smaller and more vulnerable— all her bluster belied the fact that she was barely over five feet tall. And then I didn't want to hear her apologize, or admit the truth, that she was desperately lonely, though she was unlikely to do either. "Let me get you a drink," I said. "Syl and Evie will understand."

* * *

I didn't remember how we'd ended up in Angela's apartment, only that somehow we had. Buying 'a' drink had turned into several, and by the time we stumbled up the three flights of stairs to their walk-in and she'd managed to turn her key in the lock, I was barely standing upright, clutching her arm and cackling at nothing in particular— "shush, before you wake the neighbors up," she tried to command me, but she was laughing too hard herself to get the words out.

The place was ugly and impersonal, with cottage cheese ceilings and industrial carpeting on the floor, none of the decoration Angela had even put up in her old room— when she turned on the light, I swore I saw a cockroach crawl under their weatherbeaten couch, so fast I thought it might've been a figment of my imagination. She tugged me into their bedroom. "Where's your husband, he ain't in yet?" The word still sounded so ridiculous to me. "He gonna wonder what's up with us?"

"He ain't home, he never is," she said in a dreamy, disconnected voice. "Probably out sniffin' after some other girl, and he won't bring her back here. To his sixteen-year-old wife." Their marriage bed was unmade as she tumbled into it, the sheets worn. Her gaze turned unusually soft, pleading. "Stay?"

I didn't have the heart to refuse her, and Darry was pretty good at letting me and Pony stay out on the weekends— I collapsed beside her on another flat pillow, my head spinning like I was on a county fair ride once I closed my eyes. "When you lost the baby." It was only alcohol that made me so bold; I cupped an imaginary stomach protrusion with my hand. "Was it real bad?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, with about as much genuine emotion as I'd ever heard her express, "it was terrible." She squeezed my hand tighter. "Rafa's mom, she had to get a doctor... I was in bed for a week, his kid sisters slipped me 'get well soon' cards under the door. I never wanted that baby to begin with... but I dunno, I guess I ended up gettin' attached. Thought maybe someone would love me... every baby's supposed to love their mama, right." She let out a breathless snort. "I was so fuckin' stupid. Like I ever loved mine like that."

Lying next to her, close enough to hear each other's heartbeats, it was more intimate than anything I'd ever done with Bryon. "I never thought I could feel lonely," she continued. "My whole life, I've gotten mine and to hell with everyone else... I figured I could shut the hormones off like a light switch this time too, if I tried hard enough, but it don't work like that. I hate it here, hate livin' in this lousy apartment with my old man who's too Catholic to divorce me— but it's still better than livin' with my mama, you dig? I'm just... stuck."

"Yeah, I dig," I said, and I knew it was true as I turned over onto my side and inhaled the clean scent of her hair. I was already falling asleep, my eyelids heavy, our hands still clasped. "You just can't move on. I dig."


End file.
